By Will Vandervort.

Clemson head coach Brad Brownell says they are not approaching Saturday’s noon tip at Pittsburgh as a must-win.

“If we win it, great! Obviously we want to win, but that is not going to change a lot of things,” Brownell said on Friday. “If you lose, you are still going to have more games after that. We can’t control all the outcomes. We can control our performance.”

The Tigers need a win, though. After Wednesday’s 58-52 loss to Louisville they fell to 0-2 in the ACC and are trying to avoid going 0-3 in conference play for the first time since the 1999-2000 season.

“It seems like we have not had a win in a long time,” point guard Rod Hall said. “We lost one game bad and the last one kind of cost us at the beginning of the second half so it feels like it is a must win. It will get our team going in a good direction if we win this game.”

But that will not be an easy task against a Pitt team that is 7-0 at home this season and last year whipped the Tigers by 33 points at the Petersen Center. In the last 13 years, the Panthers have won 88 percent of their home games.

“Most people just don’t understand how good Pitt basketball is,” Brownell said. “I mean in a lot of ways, Pitt is another basketball school. They go to the NCAAs almost every year. Jamie (Dixon) has a done a phenomenal job there – record attendance, sold out (games) and I don’t even know what the place sits, 13,000? And they have a waiting list for season tickets.

“I mean, it’s a rabid environment. Their students are right on top of you. It’s one of the best kept secrets outside of that area. I think people in the Northeast know about Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh basketball and they recruit a lot of players up there and have a lot to sell and it works for them. I think people down here, and people even back where I’m from in Indiana or the Midwest, really don’t understand how good of a program they have, the facilities they have and the commitment they have made to their basketball program.”

Pitt (11-4, 1-1 ACC) used all of that to intimidate Clemson last year. The 33-point loss is the second worst defeat in the Brownell era. The Panthers outrebounded the Tigers on the offensive glass 26-16, forced 14 turnovers, had six steals, shot 55.3 percent from three-point range and 56.3 percent overall.

“It is a hostile environment. Their fans are very into the game,” Hall said. “I know we don’t want to experience that again. That was a very tough loss and we got beat pretty bad.”

Hall believes they played so bad at the Petersen Center last year because not everyone’s mind was where it needed to be. They did not play as tough as they should have.

“That’s going to be the biggest thing in the game,” Hall said.

Clemson (8-6) played tough and played with a strong mindset in the loss to No. 5 Louisville on Wednesday night. Though the Tigers did not shoot the ball well and turned it over 14 times, they still managed to overcome a 17-0 run to start the second-half and found a way to position themselves for a victory with six minutes left in the game.

“I think everybody is pretty motivated. We saw the mistakes we made on film,” Hall said. “We still need to clean up a few things and build off the things that we know we did well and fix the things that we did bad.”

And play like it is a must win, sort of.

“When you are playing a road game against good teams in this league, you are trying to put yourself in position to win a game late in the second half,” Brownell said. “You have to do a lot of really good things for 35 minutes to give yourself that chance and we have to try and do some of those at Pittsburgh.”